Mary Meeker Says We’re Giving Up Our Possessions for the Internet

Analyst turned VC Mary Meeker sees a lot to be excited about in tech (mobile), and much to be worried about too. Photo: Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers

Mary Meeker, the technology analyst turned Kleiner Perkins VC, gave her year-end Internet Trends update to a filled auditorium at Stanford last night. You can click through the entire slide show here.

As you might expect, mobile continues to be Meeker’s overarching theme, and how from a use case, design and scale perspective it is changing how we do everything. One point to remember is just how large the mobile economy already is, at 5 billion phones, which means there’s a lot of opportunity as the 4 billion of those that aren’t smartphones are inevitably upgraded.

The flood of data that’s occurring is another big theme for Meeker. Now that it’s being squirreled away by every company from Facebook to Walmart and Square, there’s a massive opportunity to make sense of it and to answer hard questions with it.

Tablets are on a tear, with the iPad leading the charge. Meeker points out that almost half of American kids ages 6-12 want an iPad for Christmas, with 36 percent of those angling for an iPad Mini.

Another interesting shift that Meeker describes, seen all around us, is what she calls the move from an asset-heavy lifestyle to an asset-light existence. In practice Meeker sees this manifesting itself in how we access documents, music, and all manner of media digitally and in the cloud versus in some physical form. She points to the sharing economy, from cars to housing, as another example of this shift.

At a high level, Meeker points to a high level of debt in the U.S., and the gap between the United State’s tax revenue and its expenses being higher than at any prior peace stretch. As Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are dominating the growing and increasingly important mobile landscape, “there is a lot to be excited about in tech,” Meeker points out. But there is also “a lot to be worried about in other areas.”